Fred and Loathing on The Internet

At This Company Bad Programmers Do Not Get Arrays

2023-Oct-10

There were some updates in the past few days. I do not recall all their specifics, but I would wager that almost all changes made since the blog post are all cosmetic. Oh wait! I did add a section that does a crude job of hosting the image files that are some recent comic strips I made. Although I am proud of them, this is not the venue for talking about that. At least not until later in the blog post.

The first section is about what I learned with my update attempts to this site. This morning I was making breakneck progress in finally rebuilding my app from the data model up! I hit a snag when I felt bold enough to solve the problem of getting my spotify requests authorized on a different directory on the same server where it works, or to get it working on another damn server. I’m not proud to say it, but any changes I want to make to the API requests I make can only be done in the Prod environment. It only works there!

Right now I have a temporary dev environment on the machine hosting my web server. I got it to work on another directory. I almost got it to work on the Ubuntu VM I run on my Windows PC at home. I got a late in the day breakthrough when I confirmed I do not have a browser on my Ubuntu VM. However, I kinda remember not having one on my last Ubuntu VM, so I spent too much time trying to get browser requests to go straight to my Windows installation of Firefox.

My brain is a little foggy from all the troubleshooting going on today. The second part of each blog post is more of a brain drain in a pleasant way. I don’t want to commiserate more on the stalemate on my development efforts so let’s get down to artistic critiques.

The Brady Bunch Movie. A remake of a 1970s tv show about a wholesome family made of two widowed parents, with a respective trio of children the same sex as the parent. I never watched the show when the opportunity arose on TV Land or Nick at Nite. I was inundated with jokes about the Bradys from the other media I consumed.

They as a family and their dynamics are almost known to me. The movie is a snapshot to 1994, the year it was produced. How the USA was perceived in the early 90s in relation to its past by boomers is not unknown to me. The of-the-moment impressions the movie makes about LA in 1994 show their age. Putting the wholesome Brady's next to a stereotypical South-Central LA type environment makes this movie just as much a time capsule of the early 90s as it does TV in the 70s.

I do remember as a chlild feeling the impression that crime is rampant, unlike some idyllic past. In the early 90s I could understand the writers being provoked by the explosion in news TV that sensationalized the amount of violent crime being perpetrated. It was not actually the case, and was going down starting in the late 80s. The 70s of the Bradys was just as crime ridden as the time of the remake.

The writers of the movie had no idea just how ludicrously high real estate values would climb. A plot point involves the Brady patriarch being pushed into selling his California home for the -relatively- ludicrous sum of half a million dollars. Had he taken that -at the time- over the market bid on his home, and invested it in the most sound financial products, he still would have likely made far less money than if he held onto the house. It would be hard to predict in 1994 how damaged our real estate market could get.